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How Did We Get Here?

A small percentage of companies live in the present. Most of us are stuck in the past, with obsolete technology and outdated processes. If we stay in the past for too long, we might lose our chance to come back to the present. We might move into an alternate timeline and cease to exist.

Every company is a software company. That applies even to those that do not yet realize it. We are all running and continuously increasing our speed. It's a race without a finish line. There are no winners but rather those that fall and do not get up. We live an era of an ever-increasing speed of change. Companies are created and destroyed overnight. No one is safe. No one can allow status quo.

Technology is changing so fast that it is very hard, if not impossible to follow. The moment we learn about a new technology, it is already obsolete and replaced with something else. Take containers as an example. Docker appeared only a few years ago, and everyone is already using it for a myriad of scenarios. Still, even though it is a very young product, it changed many times over. Just when we learned how to use docker run, we were told that it is obsolete and should be replaced with docker-compose up. We started converting all our docker run commands into Compose YAML format. The moment we finished the conversion, we learned that containers should not be run directly. We should use a container scheduler instead. To make things more complicated, we had to make a selection between Mesos and Marathon, Docker Swarm, or Kubernetes.

We can choose to ignore the trends but that would mean that we would fall behind the rest of the competition. There is no alternative to a constant struggle to be competitive. Once we drop our guard and stop learning and improving, the competition will take over our business. Everyone is under pressure to improve, even highly regulated industries. Innovation is impossible until we manage to get to the present tense. Only once we master what others are doing today, can we move forward and come up with something new. Today, container schedulers are a norm. They are not the thing of the future. They are the present. They are here to stay even though it is likely that they will change a lot in the coming months and years. Understanding container schedulers are paramount. Among them, Kubernetes is the most widely used and with a massive community behind it.

Before we dive into Kubernetes, it might be worthwhile going through some history in an attempt to understand some of the problems we were trying to solve, as well as some of the challenges we were facing.